


Founder

by Lex_Munro



Series: Stories From the Fateverse [22]
Category: Doctor Who, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sci-fi, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Crossover, Gen, i promise i've got decent reasoning behind a version of the Doctor making it to a Fourteenth life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-01
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 22:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lex_Munro/pseuds/Lex_Munro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The inmates of the Network's Null-Resonance Detention Facility are entitled to parole hearings every ten to fifty years (local time), depending on the severity of their crimes.  These parole hearings are organized in batches by subject designations.  As it happens, today is the day of the Doctors' hearings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Founder

**Author's Note:**

> WOW.  okay, i totally didn’t know this was how the Network started.  seriously, i just started typing, and BAM, there it was, and i said “holy shit, REALLY?”
> 
> because yeah.  i totally don’t know what’s going to happen until i write it, either. XD;;
> 
> in retrospect, i should’ve seen it coming when Fifteen showed us Urd’s Well and the Norns were yapping about the ‘Storm that Ends Worlds.’
> 
> i wish i had a better way to slip this tidbit into the Fateverse, because this little scene serves no other real purpose and is kind of crap.
> 
>  **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  sci-fi.  Doctor Who crossover.  multiple Doctors.  language: g.
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen.
> 
>  **timeline:**   NO 3652; AD 2944 Local Time.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) the Fridge's Senior Warder was actually introduced in a scrapped scene that i'll probably give in and post; it's Eureka's Jack Carter.  2) "min-sec" = "minimum security," the null-res inmates who wear collars and basically live like well-treated zoo animals.  3) the Doctor from HF is probably a Four.  the crazy one writing on his walls is probably an Eight.  the Founder himself is a Fourteen (explained in the notes for [Ripples](http://archiveofourown.org/works/446717/chapters/771930)).  4) jammy (or jammie) dodgers are cookies (biscuits if you're British) with little cutouts in the middle filled with jam.
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://lex-munro.livejournal.com/64465.html) for terms and concepts, and [The Fateverse Appendix](http://lex-munro.livejournal.com/64565.html) for Nodes, branches, and important people.

**Founder**

 

Victoria Hand has been Head Warder for three hundred and twenty-six years.  She believes in fairness, harshness, and equality.  The laws which govern universes are mutable and can be bent, but the laws which direct the timestream are absolute.  At the very deepest levels, resonance cannot be reasoned with, or evaded, or destroyed.  The laws of the Network reflect that.

Good and bad are matters of perspective, and the Network’s perspective is vast.  Murder.  Assassination.  Terrorism.  Bad from the small perspective, from the perspective of the victim or the sympathizer.  But when the murder of one man can avert the deaths of billions in a neighboring branch, that is good. 

So, even if someone who has broken Network Law is a good man, he has done something bad, and he’s a criminal.  That’s equality for you.

Equality is something Network law does well.  Victoria’s mind is a simple, tidy place to live, thanks to that.

It makes her job very easy.

She looks at her chron—forty-five seconds to scheduled departure.  It takes the Head Proctor exactly thirty seconds to cross the distance from the door to the departure pad, she knows.  Leonard Samson is a man of precision.

Twelve seconds later, he enters the transit hub.

“Vic,” he greets as he reaches her side.

“Len,” she replies, just before the slide initiates.

Two and a half seconds for the slide to complete.  Like riding a roller-coaster blindfolded.

“Core Control, this is AR Compound,” says the Transporter working the controls.  “Primary-to-primary timeslide event completed as scheduled, Local Standard fourteen-hundred hours.  Head Warder and Head Proctor on-site.”

They step off the pad, and have to wait almost three minutes before the facility’s Senior Warder arrives.

“Am I late?” Carter asks.

Victoria doesn’t dignify this with a response.

“Two minutes and forty-one seconds,” Leonard supplies.

“Sorry, there was this thing with—uh, nevermind.  Shall we?”

By necessity, the path from the transfer rooms to the Detention Facility itself is somewhat circuitous.  They have long since memorized it.  Barring foot traffic and the odd scan abnormality, the walk takes fifteen minutes and twenty seconds.

“Parole day, huh?” says the nearest min-sec inmate—a Tony Stark.

“November,” says Carter.  “Doctor Day.”

At cell seven, they stop.  Victoria holds up her portable and scans the inmate, who is watching a vid.  The order scrolls through the screen of her portable, and she starts to read it aloud.  “Doctor HF109, you are guilty of unauthorized tuning, catastrophic timeline alteration, and evading charges fairly laid on you by a non-Network timestream authority.  These charges and your culpability are not in question.  By Network law, you were sentenced to six centuries of incarceration.  The Local Standard date is November the eighth, twenty-nine-forty-four.  You have been incarcerated for exactly two hundred and twenty-five years.  You may now elect to be cryogenically suspended or totally erased, if you so choose.  With the approval of the Head Proctor and the facility’s Senior Warder, you may also elect to continue your minimum-security confinement for the remainder of your sentence.  Should you elect to be erased, you are entitled to a speedy and humane execution unless you prefer otherwise, in which case you may dictate the manner of your death.”

The man in the cell turns and blinks at her as though only just noticing their presence.  “Sorry, what?” he says blithely.  “That was my favourite bit—I was rather engrossed.”

Frowning, Victoria repeats the parole announcement.

“Thanks very much,” he says.  “I think I’ll continue my slow death by overdose of jelly babies and old movies.  Never know, I might still come in handy someday.”

“Your preference has been logged.  Barring emergency, you will be eligible for parole again in another twenty-five years Local.”

They go through three more Doctors, one carefully covering the walls of his cell with circles and spirals.  There are a total of five in min-sec—each one simultaneously the gravest threat to timestream stability and one of the Network’s greatest assets.

“Does anyone else think it tastes like January?” asks the last of the min-sec Doctors as they approach his cell.  “Just me?”

Victoria doesn’t even have to look at the orders for this one.  “John Smith NC022-Sigma.  You are guilty of instigating the creation of a timestream-spanning organization, unauthorized tuning, catastrophic timeline alteration, and introducing pre-folding societies to advanced time theory.  These charges and your culpability are not in question.  By the laws you yourself wrote, sir, you were sentenced to lifelong incarceration.”

The Founder smiles at her, looking for all the world like a little boy watching his favorite vid.

“The Local Standard date is November the eighth, twenty-nine-forty-four.  You have been incarcerated for exactly eight hundred and fifty-five years—the entire duration of this facility’s operation.  You may now elect—”

“No, thank you,” he says sweetly.

Victoria stops.  He’s never interrupted before.  She’s visited him over a hundred times now, and he’s always let her finish.  He’s the one who _wrote_ the law that states all these orders have to be read to the subject being charged.

“Are you feeling all right, sir?” Leonard asks.

“I’m waiving my right to have my parole orders read to me,” says the Founder.  “There’s a provision for that.”

There is.  No one ever exercises it, but it’s there.  

“I’m going to continue serving my sentence in minimum security—I have to.  You can’t freeze me, because you might need me on short notice.  Can’t erase me, again because you might need me.  Because how many subjects are there, do you think, who’ve seen _all_ of Time?  Who understand the way universes are separated and linked?  Who can _feel_ the threads of causality?  Not even the fellows in the Fridge, or the ones down the way.  Because I made the harder choice.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“I risked an entire universe to give Time her own set of hands,” he replies cheerfully.  “It’s paid off, obviously…the Network is flourishing.  But we wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s an endeavour worth repeating, so here I am.”

Victoria looks at her portable, just to keep from having to look into those young-old eyes any longer.  She presses a button.  “Your preference has been logged.  Barring emergency, you will be eligible for parole again in another twenty-five years Local.”

He smiles at her.  “You know, I could waive all future parole hearings.  But then I’d have to be psychologically evaluated every ten years instead, and while it would be nice to have more frequent visitors, psychological evaluation is an exhausting process, and I should hate to make more work for Len.”

Victoria swallows.  “Are you _sure_ you’re feeling all right, sir?”

“Thanks, yes.”

“Is there anything you’d like, sir?  Books, vids, clothes?”  She thinks for a moment.  “Snacks?”

“Thanks, no,” he says.  “I’m set for snacks—Mister Carter’s girl does an absolutely brilliant jammy dodger.”

Slightly bewildered, Victoria proceeds to the end of the corridor.  Past the guards, past the next null-lock, scanned into the control room.

“Parole order oh-three-two,” she says, pressing her hand to a scanner on the central control panel.

In the cryo-room, eight towers light up.

“Thaw orders queued,” says the warder on duty.  “Control synched to your portable.”

Victoria and Leonard enter the nearest holding pen.

“I’m sure he’s just tired,” Leonard tells her.

“Wouldn’t you be?” she blurts out before she can stop herself.

Two thousand years old, burdened with the knowledge of times and spaces, haunted by the choice to kill his people or let them kill themselves…

But the Founder has never acted like this, not in all the time she’s been Head Warder.  It bothers her, because if there is one inviolate thing in her narrow view of the universes, it is that the Founder is a good man—the very best—and a pillar of their entire way of life.  If he falls, what does that bode for the rest of them?

Leonard lifts his chin.  “He’s long since made peace with it,” he tells her.  “He found the optimum stability, took the risk, and won.  And when most people would be insensate with grief or guilt, he calmly sat down and wrote an incredibly comprehensive legal system.”

“Most people wouldn’t subsequently try and sentence themselves,” she points out, and presses the button.  A tank is slotted into the gate of the holding pen, and the thaw starts.

“He’s not most people.”

She frowns.  “No…he’s not.”

And she starts to read the parole announcement of the first of eight cold-storage Doctors.

 

**.End.**


End file.
